It’s food sovereignty, not food security

Consumer Campaigner for the African Center for Biosafety, Zakiyya Ismail said that South African bread is contaminated with high levels of GM soya in the soya flour used in the bread.

Activists from around the country are gearing up for a national dialogue on the right to food in November. They plan to kick start a movement for food sovereignty in South Africa.

The African Centre for BioSafety in collaboration with the Foundation for Human Rights will host the dialogue on 29 and 30 November in Johannesburg.

If close to sixty percent of UFS students are hungry (see story), what will this gathering mean for the university’s efforts to design a programme to deal with this challenge?

Sustainability activist Nirmala Nair has urged the university to help students and staff fully understand the issues involved. “It is not just a matter of providing money,” she said from Cape Town where she is based. “It is about students understanding what food sovereignty means and it is about what they choose to eat.”

Often there was confusion between food security and food sovereignty and food self-sufficiency, said Nair. “Food security has become a cliched term for a market oriented industrial farming and distribution system of highly processed and packaged food in the name of poverty eradication,” she said.

A small group of powerful roleplayers control how food is produced, processed, stored and distributed, she said. “The consumers have no say in what food is received as part of their food aid, nor do they have a clue where the food comes from. The food disconnect starts here, resulting in many of the emerging diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer and the like.”

Food Sovereignty

Food sovereignty respects local production processes as being owned and managed by local farmers who are aware of the changing local climatic systems, interventions to support food sovereignty cannot be globalised or prescriptive, said Nair

Self sufficency introduced through eating locally grown food has been proven to be one of the best roads to stay healthy, due to the absence of processed foods, she said.

Lets just illustrate this by looking at one of the major foods most of us eat eat every day: Bread. What are we eating?

Consumer Campaigner for the African Center for Biosafety, Zakiyya Ismail said that South African bread is contaminated with high levels of GM soya in the soya flour used in the bread.

The bread market is dominated Tiger Brands, Premier Foods, Pioneer Foods and Foodcorp in both the milling (98%) and baking divisions (60%) In a country where more than 50% of people do not have regular access to food, Tiger Brands and Pioneer Foods made a profit of R2.441 billion in 2013 just from their baking divisions

In 2007, Tiger Brands was fined R98.8 million after admitting that it had colluded with rivals (Premier Foods, Pioneer Foods and Foodcorp) to raise the price of bread by 30-35 cents a week before Christmas in 2006.51 In 2010, Pioneer Foods was fined R195 million for its role in a bread price-fixing cartel, involving these other players as well. Their actions affected the “poorest of the poor, for whom these products are a staple”.

GM soya plantations are sprayed with with liberal amounts of a herbicide called glyphosate and residues of this glyphosate makes its way into this bread, she said.

Tests conducted on behalf of African Centre for Biosafety has revealed that Pioneer’s Sasko bread is the only bread with extremely low levels of GM soya, too low to be quantified. Most brands of white bread have between 21 % and 91% levels of GM soya. “Citizen activism in some areas in KZN and Nelson Mandela Bay successfully managed to convince their local Spars to bake a completely non GM bread, “ she said. “ In the absence of local, community produced bread, those with the lowest GM content or no GM content would be advised.”

The bread market is dominated Tiger Brands, Premier Foods, Pioneer Foods and Foodcorp in both the milling (98%) and baking divisions (60%) In a country where more than 50% of people do not have regular access to food, Tiger Brands and Pioneer Foods made a profit of R2.441 billion in 2013 just from their baking divisions, said Ismail.

In 2007, Tiger Brands was fined R98.8 million after admitting that it had colluded with rivals (Premier Foods, Pioneer Foods and Foodcorp) to raise the price of bread by 30-35 cents a week before Christmas in 2006.

According to the reports of her organisation, Ismail said that in 2010, Pioneer Foods was fined R195 million for its role in a bread price-fixing cartel, involving these other players as well. Their actions affected the “poorest of the poor, for whom these products are a staple,” she said. The man who blew the whistle and exposed these companies is not having an easy time. (See clip)

Charles Maisel, veteran social entrepeneur and job creator has drawn attention to another possibility that the university can consider.

An innovative project called Mama mimis was started two years ago to provide people with healthy bread. Mama mimis, a bakery prepares a premix that has no additives and lasts around 2-3 days. “Bread is made in a wood-fired stove,” said Maisels. “Mama mimis provides individuals with a stove and baking kit allowing them to start their own business. So far there are 380 bakers all over the country,” he said.

“These bakers have one person helping meaning 760 people are self employed by the system making around 20-30 loaves a day at R9 making 11400 loaves a day,” he said.

In 2007 the four largest bread manufacturers in South Africa formed one of the worst cartels in our country’s history. Bread prices spiked, leaving less food on the table for the poorest of the poor. Slapped with a multi-billion rand fine, the cartel was broken up, all because of the actions of one whistleblower: Imraahn Mukaddam.

Genetic Modification and GM Soya in South Africa

Genetic Modification is a process where genes from the DNA of one species are extracted and artificially forced into the genes of an unrelated plant or animal. The foreign genes may come from bacteria, viruses, insects, or other non related plants. In South Africa, the two types of modifications are plants that produce their own poison and plants that can absorb a poison and be unaffected by it. The poison producing plants are the ones that have been modified to produce a small amount of insecticide in every cell (usually called Insect Resistant – IR). The plants that are able to absorb a poison are plants that are able to withstand applications of glyphosate based herbicides that kill all the surrounding plants other than the GM plants (usually called Herbicide Tolerant – HT). The two gene modifications are often combined into what we call a GMO plant with stacked events.

GM soya has been commercially grown in SA since in 2002 . Over 90% of South Africa’s soya production is genetically modified. (See www.acbio.org.za)

While the herbicide manufacturers insist that glyphosate is perfectly safe, alarming evidence is emerging to disprove this . Glyphosate, has been linked to numerous health risks including increased risk of chronic kidney disease, birth defects in humans and animals and spontaneous abortions. Although glyphosate is not meant to accumulate in the human body, recent tests conducted on behalf of Moms Across America in the United States has disturbingly uncovered glyphosate residues in breast milk, urine samples and drinking water . This has far reaching implications for babies, both in the womb while organs are still developing, and after birth when the first food they are given (breast milk), is essentially toxic. As a result of these concerns, countries around the world have taken action to ban or limit its use (Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Denmark, Sweden, Brazil, the Netherlands and Argentina) .